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Decius posted:Also Guy Gavriel Kay's Under Heaven/River of Stars. Having read these two books very recently, I thought River of Stars was a bit of a step back on this count. Under Heaven featured a wide variety of sympathetically-portrayed women from lots of different walks of life, most of whom impacted the plot in interesting and important ways. River of Stars cut back on this considerably, focusing much more of its attention on a single Exceptional Woman, Lin Shan, a genius who was great at important Guy Stuff, not so great at unimportant Girl Stuff, and viewed with hostility by most other women she met. Also, the amount of interaction between women, which had been low to start with, dropped to rock-bottom (there was still some, but not very much at all). Some of this could theoretically be attributed to the country the story was set in, Kitai, becoming much more misogynistic between the books, with women being edged out of positions of influence and generally getting poked with the lovely end of the stick, but that's never stopped Kay before - in fact, given the patterns of his previous books, it should have resulted in more focus on women and their different ways of dealing with their situation. Instead, the story's efforts to address feminist themes through Shan only end up casting its own problems into starker relief. It's not terrible, mind you, but it's certainly not an improvement. On another subject, I've heard Daniel Abraham's name mentioned a lot, and was thinking of giving his work a go. Problem is, I have no idea what I'm in for or the quality thereof. Can the goon hivemind deliver its wisdom unto me?
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Jul 9, 2013 20:37
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Recently read a book that gets a lot of buzz in here - The Rook, by Daniel O'Malley. For anyone who isn't familiar with it, it's London urban fantasy that reads like a somewhat less goony cross between X-Men and Charles Stross's The Laundry Files. Overall, very good. It was a first novel, so you could see the author improving as he wrote it, but even the pre-improvement baseline was by no means bad. In particular, the story picked up a few more comedic elements as it progressed (without dropping the serious bits, mind you), which I thought worked to its favour. One thing I would say was that I didn't think Myfanwy, our protagonist, was quite as sympathetic as she was supposed to be, particularly early on, but fortunately that wasn't really relevant to the book's overall quality or enjoyability. TL;DR: I liked it.
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Jul 12, 2013 23:18
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General Battuta posted:Yes, she's one of the best prose stylists working today and an incredibly prolific, challenging, important author. That said, a lot of her work requires real effort to read because it's so loving lush and dense. I dunno, I felt it went down quite smoothly, in a modern-fairytale sort of way.
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Jul 28, 2013 14:25
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gohmak posted:Vernor Vinge Vinge does creepy? Interesting.
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Aug 4, 2013 18:26
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Seldom Posts posted:So national identity is not worth dying for? Not according to at least the last 500 years of human history, but who gives a poo poo about that? Bring on the "cool scenes." As I recall, there was a fair chunk of genocide and ethnic cleansing as well - sure, there were a few survivors, but they were heavily stigmatised and mostly served as an example for others. Also, it's discovered later that the magical fallout from the spell was slowly poisoning the entire Peninsula, which is probably a metaphor for the lingering trauma of an entire country being annihilated but also kinda sucks on a literal level as well. Basically, you do not piss Brandin off.
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Aug 8, 2013 11:47
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Besides, wasn't the main focus in the Culture books the often-horrifying impact that the perfect AI-run utopia had on those nations and species they deemed less perfect?
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Aug 9, 2013 11:22
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tliil posted:1. Kill Hitler I did always like the short story someone wrote about that cliche, though.
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Aug 17, 2013 13:34
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General Battuta posted:A lot of SF/F writers can write sex really well! Catherynne Valente's Palimpsest is a book entirely about sex and it's neither pornographic nor cringe-inducing. Sex in that book isn't even particularly erotic. I seem to recall that a chunk of why it's an old shame was less because of the storm of misogyny and more because she looked back on it and decided 'actually, yeah, the sexual politics of this book are a bit on the weird side, and not in a way I adequately addressed'. Not to say that there wasn't a lot of misogyny (because female author writing speculative fiction), just that that wasn't why she's so reluctant to talk about it these days.
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Sep 6, 2013 22:54
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The guys behind Penny Arcade may have been responsible for saying a whole lot of stupid, terrible poo poo, but I thought they really hit it out of the park for once with this Brandon Sanderson comic.
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Oct 1, 2013 11:19
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DontMockMySmock posted:A short list of best-selling English-language non-children's sci-fi/fantasy authors, distilled from here: Gosh, Burroughs was really that successful?
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Oct 14, 2013 22:10
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Cardiac posted:I've recently been enjoying the books by Alan Campbell. Read the Deepgate Codex, and can't really recommend them. There's some very cool imagery, sure, but it's horribly strung together with a messy, nonsensical, and tediously grimdark plot. Dude needs to learn to write a story, not a concept showcase.
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Dec 3, 2013 00:54
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Cardiac posted:Yeah, he's big on the imagery, not so much on the plot. Even Black Library fiction tends to have a more coherent story with more satisfying character arcs, though - those books favour very simple plots, not nonexistent ones. The Codex is just an anarchic mess, and the ending exceeds even Dan Abnett's worst. Darth Walrus fucked around with this message at 13:51 on Dec 3, 2013 |
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Dec 3, 2013 13:49
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Jedit posted:In fairness, it's probably a case of someone engaging the mouth before the brain was in gear. That's what a great deal of bigotry tends to be, though.
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Dec 7, 2013 11:32
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andrew smash posted:All these years later consider phlebas is the only culture novel I've reread more than twice. It's just a ludicrously fun book to read. It does have some great setpieces. I particularly like the chase scene through the GSV.
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Dec 29, 2013 00:06
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BrianWilly posted:Buddy, when you're done putting words into my mouth could you also maybe stop jumping to conclusions and tripping over them? I said I used to enjoy these books, as in, "I have not finished one since 1999." I read through this new one while I was in Barnes & Noble because I was curious what the series was like now. Well, there's certainly some very questionable stuff about fourteen-year-olds in A Spell For Chameleon. quote:“It can all be yours,” she said. The alluring fourteen-year-old reappeared. “No other woman can make you this promise.”
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Jan 4, 2014 02:49
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EdBlackadder posted:I think I got as far as 'UKIP supporter' on his Wikipedia page before vowing to never read any opinion he has. Seriously, there's enough of that shite around here at election time I don't need to waste my leisure hours getting increasingly angry. For any unaware US goons, UKIP is our version of the Tea Party, only with a few more poorly-hidden neo-Nazis in its ranks.
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Jan 13, 2014 16:00
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Cardiovorax posted:You probably wouldn't, they're awful books by any measure. Really? Mists of Avalon seems to get pretty good buzz.
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Jan 21, 2014 00:21
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GrannyW posted:Also, if you can't read what is available publicly and in the light, it will fester and spread rot in the dark. And when you shed hard light on it, the flaws and rot become obvious. The gently caress does this mean? By refusing to read creepy poo poo we encourage it?
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Feb 21, 2014 10:25
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Coldforge posted:Translation: If you try to ban it, say through a blacklist, it just goes underground and becomes harder to keep track of, and probably gets even worse through the magic of "positive" reinforcement loops. Right, and compiling a list of books with the notice 'hey, this poo poo's kinda sexist/racist/homophobic, so if you're not into that, you might want to skip it' is going to cause a thriving John Ringo black market because...?
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Feb 21, 2014 11:59
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Right, yeah, Lovecraft's circle was not exactly a bunch of moderate liberals even by the standards of the time. Howard, for instance, was creepily enthusiastic about exterminating 'savages', whether they be sub-Saharan Africans or native Americans, at a time when the KKK had been terminally discredited, Eleanor Roosevelt's civil-rights movement was gaining major ground, and the Harlem Renaissance was in full swing (the situation for native Americans still sucked, but they'd been granted automatic American citizenship by the time he started publishing stories, so his 'put them all to the sword' approach was not exactly in vogue).
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Feb 21, 2014 21:57
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fookolt posted:Sometimes I read posts like this and I have a really hard time believing that you aren't making this poo poo up. What was that other series? Honor Harrington or something? People are loving weird. The Waters Rising is pretty bizarre by all accounts as well.
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Feb 23, 2014 11:54
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I think this conversation between the hero and his talking horse tells you most of what you need to know about The Waters Rising:quote:“Oh, mares,” said Blue, shaking his head. “They always have to be whinnied into it. Or . . . subdued.”
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Feb 27, 2014 14:20
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Keep in mind that Mieville is writing in a universe that's basically a victorian industrial fantasy dystopia worse than something Marx would've imagined after ingesting a steamshovel-load of bad shrooms. It's designed to be the perfect dystopia to produce a Marxist utopia as a result, just like the moon prison colony in Heinlein's MIAHM is designed to be a perfect fictional ground from which his perfect fictional libertarian utopia can flower. Doesn't the Marxist revolution fail miserably, though?
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Mar 4, 2014 20:58
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Jedit posted:Then why write the sex scene? If it's purely there for plot purposes you can make it clear that the characters are going to have sex then pan to the lightbulb. That can dull the emotional impact, though. I think one of the best uses of sex to serve the narrative I've seen is in Lois McMaster Bujold's Komarr, when Ekaterin and her husband have sex. It's spectacularly unsexy, and really underlines the hollow, robotic sham their marriage is in a way that I don't think a fade-to-black would have. Regarding magic systems, I think the problem with Sanderson's 'magic is a science' approach is that he doesn't go far enough. His magic is very limited, generally restricted to a chosen few and primarily based around combat. It doesn't really shape society, except on an abstract, macro level - all it does is add a layer of videogame sperg to his fight scenes. This seems to me like precisely the opposite of the best reason for demystifying magic - to democratise it, to turn it into a known property built into society and to see where that society gets taken. Show me clothing that reshapes itself to best suit the season and its owner's body thanks to the clothing golem sewn into it, and show me the vicious internecine politics of the fashion-priests who decide the golems' tastes. Show me sweatshops crewed by summoned daemons, and what happens when they try to unionise. Show me an agricultural system kicked into overdrive by localised weather-manipulation, and show me how the law regulates it (or doesn't) to keep farmers from (literally) raining on each other's parades and to avoid it generating a climate catastrophe elsewhere. If magic is so mundane and everyday, why are people using it so narrowly?
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Mar 10, 2014 12:02
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Cardiac posted:Old Man's War and Ghost Brigades are worth reading. The rest of the sequels are pretty bad and not in the same vein as Old man's war. I dunno, I like The Last Colony for how everything blows up in the Colonial Union's face.
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Mar 14, 2014 14:54
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Worth noting that River of Stars is a bit of a step down from Under Heaven, particularly in its treatment of female characters (rather than a diverse and sympathetic cast offering a variety of interesting perspectives, we get a single fantasy-standard Exceptional Woman and that's it), even if I did appreciate the Water Margin lift.
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Mar 17, 2014 13:58
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Antti posted:Yeah, while I haven't read River of Stars, I consciously left it out based on what I'd heard. Oh yeah, Tigana's my favourite. It just feels like a more complete and satisfying story than Al-Rassan - don't get me wrong, that's a good book, but it just doesn't feel quite as beautifully structured.
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Mar 17, 2014 14:09
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Hedrigall posted:Anyone else read The Burning Dark by Adam Christopher yet? I'm about 40% in and it's really compelling. Lots of spookiness and mystery aboard a space station. A cover quote calls it The Haunting of Hill House in space, and that's a pretty apt comparison so far. Other reviews are invoking Event Horizon, which is like my favourite horror movie. Read this and The Goblin Emperor (which was very agreeable, and which I would recommend to anyone who wants more politicking in their fantasy, even though the terminology can be quite hard to digest). The short version is that I thought it an imperfect but fun read that marks a positive addition to the woefully small pool of space horror stories, and the long version... well, I'll warn you right now, it's going to contain giant loving spoilers if you haven't finished the book. You could maybe say that the book explains too much, but I think that's just a consequence of not deviating much from the source material - 90% of the plot is explained if you read the prologue and then either have a basic understanding of Japanese mythology or decide to Google that psychiatrist's unusual name. In that sense, the mystery is really more on the characters' end - they're spending the book catching up with what the reader already knows, and the big infodump near the end was a courtesy for the mythology-illiterate. There's a few things that make this work better than it might. First, the myth the author picked is a great little horror story in its own right, and since sci-fi horror is nerd catnip, fusing them works really well. Second, the myth is treated with respect. There's a technobabbly explanation at the end, but it feels less like 'ohoho those silly naive peasants were mistaken and their gods were just weird aliens', which would have lessened the impact and diminished the villain's menace, and more like the characters are trying to filter something completely insane and terrifying (that their government once tunnelled into Japanese Hell, and are now so desperate to win a losing war against an existential threat that they have bargained away thousands of their best and brightest to a homicidal goddess) through a rational, scientific lens, and aren't entirely succeeding. Third, this is a far-future setting where most present-day traditions are dead and gone, which explains a good chunk of the characters' ignorance about stuff like a spacesuit with CCCP on the helmet. I guess the lack of Space Wikipedia is a bit odd, but you can probably chalk much of their difficulty in looking stuff up to a consequence of Shadow's interference with their electronics and Izanami's mindfuckery. Like I said, the book isn't perfect. The usual haunted-house idiocies are present and correct (seriously, guys, never split the party), and the characters are slow to learn from their mistakes. The cast's at about genre-standard level, though, rather than being unusually dim, and the author gives himself an out in the form of a mind-affecting villain. I did wish he'd explained more of what was up with Ludmilla, though - why was she, of all the souls Izanami claimed, able to stand up to her? It just felt a bit arbitrary. Still, it's space horror that makes solid use of cool and unusual source material. That gets it a thumbs-up from me.
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Apr 14, 2014 12:12
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Hedrigall posted:Really, because here's my thoughts as I headed towards the ending: How close in to the ending? Because yeah, I think that, like, the last few pages were weak, with some tension being lost to the aforementioned catchup for people who still didn't have a clue, and a bit too much of the climax being offscreen and/or open-ended/underexplained (What was the deal with the full transcript of Ludmilla's death? What purpose did it serve? Wasn't all of it information we already had?). However, it seemed like it did enough, without retroactively ruining the rest of the story. It's not like the ending, to, say, the Deepgate Codex, which was a complete loving disaster and felt like the author had just run out of pages. Actually, I'd place it above Hull Zero Three as well in terms of how much tension it manages to retain, because Zero Three really deflated hard quite a bit earlier (though that wasn't my only complaint with that book - the first part went past 'intentionally confusing' straight into the realm of 'unpleasantly difficult to parse').
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Apr 14, 2014 15:10
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Hedrigall posted:After a slow and terrifying build up of horrific visions and people disappearing, the main threat turns out to be a Japanese spirit thing who literally stands on a pile of corpses wielding her katana, uguu~. The book turned into anime. It became anime, in my hands. loving Adam Christopher weeaboo piece of poo poo. That was kind of obvious from literally the first few chapters. I mean, poo poo, the prologue was named 'Yomi', and then a vaguely sinister-looking character named Izanami showed up. Sure, not everyone has even the slightest of passing familiarities with Japanese mythology, but that's entry-level, like if the book started with a prologue entitled 'HELL' that had some dude moping about how God's a douchebag and he wants out, and then introducing a friendly, slightly off character called Satan Lucifer. I get that goons have a violently antipathic reaction to anime (with good reason), but you were warned well in advance, and this poo poo only qualifies as 'anime' by dint of coming from the same country and showing up in an inherently nerdy subgenre. It's almost literally Event Horizon with a different national mythology. I mean, I'd get what you were complaining about if you were talking about, say, the Grand Central Arena series, because jesus christ Ryk Spoor tone it down, but this is basically 'OH MY GOD IT WAS JAPANESE I GOT JAPANESE ON ME GET IT OFF GET IT OFF GET IT OFF'. Sorry about the big blocks o' black, by the way. Not sure how to reduce them unless everyone's cool with me spoiling some plot poo poo. e: ah, hell, it's not like the author is trying to hide it. Summary - The Burning Dark is basically Event Horizon with Christianity swapped out for Japanese mythology. It's a fun, light read that's solidly written enough, with the downsides being the usual horror slow-wittedness, one irritatingly underexplained plot point, and a merely so-so ending. If you liked that movie, and if the merest mention of Japan doesn't cause you to back away whilst reaching for the garlic and crucifix, then you'll probably like this. Darth Walrus fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Apr 15, 2014 |
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Apr 15, 2014 10:18
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Piell posted:It would be just as dumb if it was a Navajo ghost with a tomahawk. I give it a bit more of a pass because she's the goddess of death, so the actual mythology frequently depicts her with either a katana or the more ladylike naginata (long-bladed halberd) for harvesting her thousand souls a day. It's kind of like the Grim Reaper's scythe, it's not there just because JAPAN - or if it is, then the author stumbled on a very lucky coincidence.
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Apr 15, 2014 16:43
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I kinda wanna know what that story Vox got nominated for is like. I mean, guy's a literal fascist - I'm kind of imagining an unironic Iron Dream or something similarly, transcendently awful.
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Apr 20, 2014 11:54
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GrandpaPants posted:I woke up and read this post and now I'm starting my day angry. Like holy poo poo that is bad. Somehow, I suspect that it's more the case that the pre-social-media era had the same amount of horrible poo poo (or more), but it's harder to dig up. Just look at how much of the recent terribleness has been focused around the SFWA old guard getting pissed that those drat gays, brown people, and women are coming in and playing with their toys.
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Apr 20, 2014 16:52
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Gave The Traitor's Blade by Sebastien de Castell a go based on the positive buzz from this thread. It's good and well-written, with an engaging narrative voice, but I will warn you here and now that it's heavy on the grimdark, with only just enough moments of rewarded idealism to keep it from being fitfully amusing torture/misery-porn. I'll read more from the series, but I'm viewing it with caution, and if it does end up going much darker with any less light at the end of the tunnel, I'm out. Don't get me wrong, it was a fun read and worth it, but it did keep getting perilously close to being not-fun. Also, the ending was a bit of a deus-ex-machina, which is forgivable in a series when there's more books to come but could have used more buildup anyway. Darth Walrus fucked around with this message at 16:20 on Apr 21, 2014 |
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Apr 21, 2014 16:18
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Wolpertinger posted:Maybe I've read too much modern fantasy but The Traitor's Blade was completely not grimdark at all, and while bad stuff happened it was nowhere near torture/misery porn. Despite the bad poo poo that happened it was too idealistic at it's core - it's using a trend common in modern fantasy where everything may have gone to poo poo and be dark, the main characters scrabble to make the world a better place in some way and actually succeed. In a grimdark misery porn book, idealistic characters make no notable difference, possibly make everything worse, and will probably die horribly or have their hopes and dreams crushed. The fact that the idealism of the king and the main characters pays off and is rewarded in the end, even if they struggled to get there, makes me think of it as non grimdark. The thing is, there are a lot of cases where the characters' idealism didn't pay off - see the entire sequence of events from the start of the book until the dungeon rescue, which consisted of poo poo getting worse and worse (and worse) with only slight, occasional glimmers of light to set it off, several of which were then rapidly snuffed out. I agree that in the end, there was enough of a thread of hope to keep it bearable. All I'm saying is that it felt like a very close-run thing - as in, the dungeon rescue happened a few pages before I was about to go 'yo, I out', and I don't blame anyone who felt that it had exceeded their personal limit by then. Some folks ain't in this for the dark stuff, so I thought it was a reasonable warning just in case.
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Apr 22, 2014 23:05
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Bread Set Jettison posted:I am struggling to finish The Warded Man by Peter V Brett. I picked it up because it was supposed to be a gritty fantasy novel, and was highly recommended. Unfortunately I 100% can't stand Arlen as a character and think he's super arrogant and annoying. I do like the world quite a bit, and other main characters way way way more than him though. Word on that series is that it starts poor and then gets worse and worse, with some really ugly misogyny creeping in later on. I'd quit while you were ahead.
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Apr 29, 2014 19:09
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Malazan might count, simply by dint of the baseline competence level being raised so ludicrously high, though good luck figuring out who the main female character is. Or the male protagonist, for that matter.
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Apr 30, 2014 21:25
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Kellanved posted:Congratulations General Battuta! I'll be sure to buy your book! Deathless I get, but I remember Orphan's Tales being pretty upbeat. It goes to some dark places, sure, but there's almost always light at the end of the tunnel, and that light is rarely too far away. Darth Walrus fucked around with this message at 14:40 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 14:38
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Neurosis posted:I have a high tolerance for John C Wright's craziness, given that for his flaws he IS really imaginative and a decent writer, so will look into it anyway. Further, since it's Dying Earth the setting is sufficiently removed from the modern day the opportunity to disseminate horrible opinions should be reduced. I dunno, the stories the genre was named after had some pretty dodgy stuff in them. Vance wasn't Piers Anthony, sure, but he could be a bit of a creepy old man.
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May 4, 2014 22:45
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yeah, things like the crisis of faith don't even happen in most military SF. The treatment of the token bleeding-heart liberal character was also an interesting sign of things to come - the end assessment was that his ideas were actually totally right, but he, personally, was too much of an ego-tripping dumbass to live long enough to put them into action.
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May 18, 2014 11:41
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